Wednesday, June 24, 2015

The Refugee Crisis in Context

A report issued by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
last week provided a jarring statistical glimpse at the unprecedented
crisis facing 59.5 million people who are currently displaced.[1]
With ongoing wars and sectarian conflicts raging in Syria, Iraq,
Ukraine, South Sudan and Somalia, and record numbers moving in search of
economic betterment, an additional 8.1 million people were uprooted in
2014. If all of the world’s refugees were to form one independent
country, it would be the 24th largest, just behind Italy and
ahead of South Africa. This country would contain .8% of the global
population, which means that if it were instead composed of the world’s
richest people, it would possess nearly half of the planet’s wealth.[2]

What’s more, these two hypothetical countries would represent
opposite sides of the same coin. It is no accident that the
concentration of global wealth is accelerating alongside the numbers of
the dispossessed. It is the very predictable result of a US-led system
of economic and military hegemony that values the mobility of labor and
capital, but not of people, and that reflexively destabilizes any regime
it views as being inadequately obsequious. Meanwhile, the market
fundamentalism it espouses effectively turns farms into agribusinesses
and cities into slums. It displaces as a matter of course. This is the
part that the UNHCR report missed: the refugee is neoliberalism’s
refuse.

Unmanaged capitalism produces unmanageable waste, human included. The
reserve army of labor has long been filled, and so the remaining
population is superfluous. Meanwhile, the scope of neoliberalism is
practically global. There is no longer a hinterland, nor much space for
an alternative such as subsistence agriculture. Precarious, low-wage
labor is the international norm, even increasingly so in the industrial
north, where social-democratic protections are under steady assault.
Nonetheless, conditions remain superior enough in these countries to
attract millions of migrants each year, though the centrifugal force
that propels people out of their home countries continues to operate in
their adopted lands, driving them to the margins. Quite often they will
find themselves veritably stateless: lacking any foundation to return
to, and having no visible path forward. They become trapped in a state
of “liminal drift,” as Michel Agier calls it. They are permanently
transitory, forever seeking a resolution that stubbornly remains out of
reach.

Some migrants wind up in camps that are essentially prisons, often
for protracted periods. Last year, Americans gained familiarity with
their own numerous border detention centers and the abominable
conditions that prevail therein, with people being held for months at a
time awaiting determination on their cases.
In Africa, the process can
go on for decades. In Dabaab, Kenya, there are three migrant towns
operated by UNHCR, primarily housing refugees from the Somali Civil War.
There are currently about 450,000 people in an area originally designed
to handle only 90,000, and some have been there since the formation of
the settlement in 1991.[3]
In April of this year, Kenya’s Deputy President William Ruto demanded
that UNHCR close the camp over security concerns stemming from the
al-Shabab attack on the town of Garissa.[4] The government has since back-peddled, though inhabitants continue to live in fear.

In all, the UNHCR reports that sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 3.7
million refugees, with most coming from Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, the
Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic.[5]
The catalyst for these migrations is the growing instability of African
states amidst civil war and regional sectarian conflicts, and the
concomitant proliferation of terrorist organizations throughout the
region. The blame for the conflagration on the continent rests with the
Obama administration and its substantial expansion of military
operations under the auspices of AFRICOM, with 674 missions last year,
up from 172 in 2008,[6]
together with its disastrous intervention in Libya.
As the U.S. moved
to depose Qaddafi because he did not always bend to American dictates,
the country was thrown into prolonged chaos, during which the former
leader’s weapons were dispersed throughout the continent, with many
landing in the hands of militants in Mali, thus stoking the ongoing
civil war there.[7]
Meanwhile, the continued conflict in South Sudan must be viewed as the
result of a failure of state building by the United States, which was
the principal proponent of the founding of that country. These examples
provide but a small sampling of the ways in which Washington is
responsible for the worsening situation in Africa.

Of course, the U.S. role in creating humanitarian crises is nowhere
clearer than in the Middle East. The conditions for the creation of
ISIS, which is now the primary driver of refugees in Iraq and Syria,
were born of the resentment fueled by decades of American meddling and
provocation. Meanwhile, a recently declassified Defense Intelligence
Agency document from 2012 evinces the fact that the Pentagon understood
that their support of the Syrian opposition would most likely benefit
radical Salafists.[8]
Despite months of talk about supporting some imaginary, moderate
rebels, we now know that the Defense Department knew better. They may
not have appreciated just how brutally puritan the resulting form of
Salafism practiced by ISIS would be, but certainly possessed enough
sound intelligence to prevent further exacerbating regional instability
by throwing weapons and training at the then amorphous opposition.

Eventually, the group that coalesced into ISIS was able to commandeer
a vast array of weapons from the demoralized Iraqi Security Forces.
This includes 74,000 machine guns, and 2,300 of the 3,500 Humvees that
the U.S. provided, which are now busily being converting into mobile
suicide bombs.[9]
From exploding tanks to graphic beheadings, this spectacle of terror
has led to millions fleeing persecution. As such, Syria has now
surpassed Afghanistan as the world’s largest source of refugees.[10]
Among them are 2,000 Palestinians that had to flee from Yarmouk during
an ISIS and al-Nusra takeover earlier this year. Like the aforementioned
African migrants, many members of this community were caught in a
liminal state for decades, only to then become double refugees: leaving
one indeterminate situation for another. The displacement of the already
displaced is an unmistakable characteristic of the neoliberal order.

In contrast to the long-term camps seen in third world countries,
their industrialized counterparts have been markedly less hospitable and
patient in the face of the growing crisis. This lack of compassion is
witnessed in Australia’s refusal to accept members of the Rohingya
community from Burma, desperately fleeing political persecution there.

Meanwhile, tensions have flared in Europe over how to distribute the
refugee “burden.” France has returned some 6,000 migrants to Italy so
far this year, claiming that the latter has failed to properly process
them. Most recently, France has closed the border near Ventimiglia,
prompting Italian police to forcibly close a camp of mostly Ethiopian
and Eritrean refugees. The Italian state is desperate for help from its
European partners to absorb the flow, as some 57,000 displaced people
have landed in the country so far this year.[11]

For its part, France has played a particularly disgusting role in
this saga, which is hardly surprising given its recent history of
treatment of minority communities within its borders. This is the land
of the burka ban, where Nicolas Sarkozy rose to power on promises to
hose the scum (“les racailles”) out of the streets of the suburban
ghettos, and both he and his Socialist successor, Francois Hollande,
forcibly expelled Roma communities in 2010 and 2012, respectively.
Likewise, the French government has broken down several makeshift camps
in recent years in the port city of Calais, and Human Rights Watch has
documented widespread police abuse and harassment of migrants living
there. Reports include unprovoked beatings and deployment of
pepper-spray, even on people obeying orders. Volunteers have found
evidence of physical abuse, including scars and broken bones, which
victims claim were inflicted by French authorities.[12]

News coverage of these stories of the dispossessed tends to look at
the issue in isolation, while policymakers generally seek easy
scapegoats. Smugglers are often portrayed as the cause of the crisis.
Other times, Western leaders point to war and poverty in the Global
South, without acknowledging the forces behind the privation prevailing
throughout poor countries of the world. Rarely do mainstream
commentators draw lines between the Mediterranean, the Rio Grande, and
Yarmouk. If they were to, they would see that the story of the refugee
has some terrifying implications for all of humanity.

Neoliberalism has transformed the secure into the precarious and the
subaltern into refuse. It has created previously unknown flows of
information and capital, while holding the displaced in captivity.
Indeed, the ever-rising American prison population must be seen as a
connected phenomenon. Far from enshrining freedom, market fundamentalism
converts flesh into monetary quantity. It also provokes fear, because
we are able to witness the hardships endured by the underclass, thus
reminding us of our own expendability. Zygmunt Bauman notes: “Rather
than remaining a misery confined to a relatively small part of the
population, as it used to be perceived, assignment to ‘waste’ becomes
everybody’s potential prospect – one of the two poles between which
everybody’s present and future social standing oscillates.” As long as
one of us is deemed rubbish, the rest of us have a vested interest in
identifying and addressing the underlying cause. The refugee crisis
riddle will not be solved until we repel the forces that created it.

Whilst largely in agreement with the ideas presented here, we would argue that it is not just 'neoliberalism' which is guilty as charged but that neoliberalism is just one facet in a long history of capitalism which has continuously found ways to increase its assets through accumulation, whatever the cost to people and planet. There may have been changes in degree but coming to the conclusion that now things have gone too far is somewhat blinkered. It has long been time to say enough is enough. There will be no stopping unmanaged capitalism except to abolish it completely. That is our aim.